Every
good book has a dénouement, the winding down of the story
following the climax. Since
I want this to be a good book, I am considering my visit to Acadia
National Park to be the climax of my journey so that my travel
homeward can be the dénouement.
I think it’s wholly appropriate since I have described my
main objective as a bicycle journey to all of the National Parks
in the continental United States.
I
departed (5-3) Acadia the same way I arrived – Maine Rt. 3 to
Ellsworth, then U.S. Rt. 1 to Belfast where I stopped for the
night. This was a
minor departure from my travel itinerary, as I have decided to
cross Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont a little further south than
I had planned. The
reason – well, I am now primarily looking for towns big enough
to have motels instead of forests big enough to have campgrounds.
Sometimes
when you travel the opposite direction, you notice things you
hadn’t noticed before. Such
was the case with Fort
Knox in Bucksport, Maine.
Traveling north a couple of days earlier, I had seen a sign
for the fort, but nothing of the fort itself.
Today
,
traveling south, the fort clearly stood out on the west bank of
the Penobscot River. It
looked worthy of a visit, so I made one.
It’s a Maine State Historical Site, but there wasn’t
anyone around today to ask questions of, so I don’t know as much
as I would like to know. Most
important, why are there two Fort Knox’s?
(There’s also one in Kentucky where the government’s
gold reserve is stashed.) Second,
when and why was the fort built?
I’m assuming it was built as a coastal defense fort in
the early to mid-1800s since it looks quite a bit like other
coastal defense forts I saw in Florida. The only displays I found within the fort relate to it being
manned in 1898 during the Spanish-American War when there was
concern that the Spanish fleet might attack the northeast part of
the United States. The
same displays spoke of the fort’s cannon being “outdated” by
1898. Despite the
lingering questions, it was still a nice place to visit.
(Great
Adventures to Scenic Places)
